Summary

Guidance on monitoring freshwater habitats is available under
four broad headings: Canals, Ditches, Freshwater Lakes and
Rivers.

For each of the four main habitat types there is an
introduction and description of the habitat in the United Kingdom,
sections on attributes and targets for each feature, approach to
monitoring, recommended visiting period and skill requirements. A
suggested methodology for assessing the habitats is included in the
Annex. The generic tables for favourable condition listing
attributes and their targets for each habitat are included at the
end of each document.

This guidance:

identifies a set of generic attributes to assess status of the
feature, highlighting those attributes that should be used on
all sites, and those that are site-specific (discretionary) to be
used to reflect local distinctiveness;

provides advice on setting targets

Freshwater lakes guidance updated March 2015

The Standing Waters guidance was
updated to incorporate changes to monitoring and classification
practices and methods resulting from Water Framework Directive
(WFD) implementation in the UK. It includes the use of
several WFD metrics, environmental standards and classification
tools, thus giving much closer alignment between monitoring for
Conservation and WFD purposes. Explicit targets have been
added for nitrogen, chlorophyll and acidity, thereby allowing
better diagnosis of ecological problems. The revised approach
therefore makes much more effective and efficient use of
pre-existing data, whilst providing a more consistent and coherent
framework for collection of new data if required.

The text has also been substantially edited and formatted to focus
on key messages, remove unnecessary appendices and bring targets
into the main body of the document alongside the explanatory text
for each attribute.

This edition of the guidance was peer reviewed in October 2014
according to JNCC procedures, and approved for publication in
February 2015.

Rivers guidance updated January 2014 with further minor
amendments in September 2016 to reflect changes in WFD methods

This guidance forms a comprehensive revision of the previous
version, aimed to improve its consistency and ease of use and to
take account of the monitoring work for the EC Water Framework
Directive (WFD) undertaken by the environment agencies in the UK.
Some of the main changes are to the water quality and flow targets
resulting from an extensive literature review carried out by
Natural England, as well as the inclusion of biological metrics for
plant and invertebrate communities based on the WFD, and simpler
and clearer ways of assessing a range of other attributes.